Lifestyle First
What’s the point of careers planning if the ouput isn’t a lifestyle you really really want?
A lot of careers planning processes miss this. You must start with ‘lifestyle planning’ and work backwards. It doesn’t have to be anything too fancy (but it can be). You need to determine where you want to live, with who, doing what outside of work, and where and so on. And how much money you’ll need to earn to enable this lifestyle.
Then you can start planning your ideal career to enable this, based on your strengths, talents, interests etc
But where and how do you start with all of this? Read on…
Careers Planning Alone?
A lot of careers planning processes isolate you. You’re either on your own planning your career, or you might have paid someone to help you one to one. But what about all the juicy ideas you could get from other people? Two heads are better than one, and many heads are better than two. What if someone else had that one idea that you hadn’t yet found that could change your career direction forever? Connecting with others is so easy these days - so use their brain power to help you!
If you want to plan your career and lifestyle out with the help of other like-minded people, then checkout The Great Career Escape:
http://www.thegreatcareerescape.com
There’s a free account that you can sign up for, a free ebook to help you find and get in to your ideal career, and you can use the social networking on the site and forums to connect with others, and get thinking and planning your years ahead.
The site is evolving fast, has a full careers planning process for you to follow through to find and get in to your ideal career, and will be kept up to date with careers planning ideas, tools, tips and resources.
http://www.thegreatcareerescape.com
The careers planning kit is evolving for 2010!
I’ll still post here and I’d like to meet and help as many people as I can along the way. But for now, head to the new Facebook Fan Page “The Great Career Planner”.
You can search for it within Facebook or click here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Great-Career-Planner/296752763114?v=app_4949752878&ref=ts
There you’ll get all the help and resources you’ll need for careers planning.
You might also like to check out my personal blog on steering and advancing your career here: http://markmoore.posterous.com/
If you sign up to posts you’ll get priority special offers!
Start 2010 by getting your career on the right track!
Join the majority! Most people don’t know either, but you’re one step ahead of them - you’ve acknowledged the fact! The others are still working away in the wrong career because they don’t know what the next step is to get out. You’re doing the next step right now. 
I didn’t know what I wanted to do for my first few years working, and I ended up feeling very miserable in a number of roles. I gradually felt worse and worse, stuck in a rut, out of my depth, not doing what I was naturally best at (a strong feeling of some sort of wasted talent!), and not feeling respect for myself and from others.
This got so bad that I hit a point when I knew I had to fix this!
I didn’t know what to do, so I simply made it my mission to find out.
That’s what you should do if you’re identifying with this.
It was actually fairly easy to do, was really enjoyable to do, very energising and motivating (of course it is - you’re finding out how to enjoy spending the rest of your life whilst also earning a living!). And it wasn’t long until I found my perfect career, and then made a plan to get into it!
It’s now 6 years later. I’m still working in the same career and because I ended up doing what I was driven to do, naturally good at, loved doing, it has not only felt like I’m not even ‘working’ but I’ve got naturally better and better at it.
When you’re in the club of working in the right career, it’s magical. You get good at it faster, and people are drawn to your service more. They want to employ or buy from people who are enthusiastic, energetic and KNOW about their work. If they love their work, they care about it and they care about their customers and the solutions they provide.
EVERYTHING changes.
So here’s my immediate advice to you if you identify with this post. SET A GOAL WITH A DEADLINE TO FIND OUT WHAT YOUR IDEAL CAREER IS.
Give yourself a month to 2 months to find it. You should be able to find it much faster, but you MUST dig up the right resources that get you THINKING about this area and looking at what ‘presses your buttons’ in life.
An Excellent Starting Point
You’ve got to start somewhere, so take this recommendation from me - someone who has used it, applied it and got it working. Buy this book from Amazon:
UK Amazon - The Pathfinder (click here)
USA Amazon - The Pathfinder (click here)
Then…grab a pen and a marker pen, read it thoroughly highlighting anything of interest and taking plenty of notes. Grab more note paper and do the exercises. Spend the next 1 to 2 months with this in your mind (and you may of course like to check out other resources). And live and breathe the idea that you are on a mission to find your ideal career.
This book is a great starting point. Good luck.
P.S. Subscribe to this RSS feed too! Keep coming back, because I’ll gradually be revealing what I believe is the best strategy for finding your ideal career. And note, I strongly believe that the answer is one only YOU will work out from lots of thought about yourself. I believe that the probability of a careers advisor hitting the right answer for you is extremely low. YES, once you’ve identified some career areas that you’d like to investigate further, then careers advisors may be useful. But please please don’t ask them what you should do. They get asked it all the time, and what’s worrying is many of them try to answer.
Welcome to the Careers Planning Kit!
I have one goal only; to get you happily earning a living in your perfect career.
When you’re working but it doesn’t even feel like ‘work’ and you’re doing what you love and experiencing the rewards you desire as well as earning a living, then I’ve achieved my goal, and I hope you have too.
Why can I help you do it? Because I’ve done it myself and I’ve helped many others do it over the last 5 years through my work. I’ll explain….
In hindsight, careers planning was without a doubt the most important thing I did in my life. It turned my life around, and I’ll explain why and how.
Ever wondered why so many people are unhappy in their work? Well stop wondering, because the answer is simple. They didn’t plan their career. They just didn’t do it. Most people accept that they have to work to make a living and they browse the newspapers or job sites and look for something that they feel they could do.
What they neglect to think about is what spews out the other end of this approach; lifestyle…that they didn’t purposefully choose. Lifestyle - how you live your life, the things you do, experience, own, the people you spend time with, all of this is affected by what you do in your career. Think about it.
Your career is the biggest factor in determining your lifestyle.
Look at it like a simple system. Careers planning goes in….desired lifestyle comes out.
If you don’t plan your career, you’ll get what you’re given.
If you plan it, you increase the chances of getting exactly what you want.
In my next post I’ll explain more about careers planning and why it could well be one of the most important things you’ll ever do in your life. And it’s not just the ‘doing it’. You’ve got to DO IT RIGHT!
Stay tuned…